Thousands of Years of Study, Still Unsolved

There is a strange duality in our studies of memory. On the one hand, we have spent thousands of years trialling different methods to learn, remember, and recite. We have therefore tinkered, refined and developed highly effective strategies. On the other hand, we still don’t really get it, neuroscientifically. The brain is one of the least understood parts of the body, and the exact processes of memory formation and storage are complex, so our ideas and theories about the biochemical side of things remain incomplete.

​ For me personally, the idea of being able to recite whole books, or book-length sagas and poems, is totally alien. This earliest form of history, the oral tradition, is so far away from the way I live my life. I encounter an overwhelming amount of fast-paced information, and am dependent on writing and re-Googling things countless times. There are wiki pages I know I have visited a dozen times or more, and I have made no effort to ever remember their contents. I know it’ll still be there next time I search the topic up.

It’s important, though, for the normal person now to realise that oratory was not reserved for those with freakish gifts and savants; it was a career path or skill for normal people. It feels, therefore, like these abilities lie dormant within us, unused for centuries but accessible to anyone stupid enough to give it a crack… Consequently, I will be giving it a crack.

Before I started my own attempts at memorisation of poems and short stories as a hobby, I felt it was right to properly familiarise myself with the full history of techniques. How people learned historically, how people remember now, and what the data says. The rest of this piece will be all of my findings across 3 book excerpts and a slew of academic papers.

What did the Romans ever do for us?

Aqueducts. Irrigation. Also, the mind palace! I had always assumed this was a modern technique. It’s something I associate more with Derren Brown than ancient history, but Ancient Roman Orator Quintilian advocated for the mind-palace, or “spacious house”, or alternatively placing memories along a specific walk. Given that this method is still in use, it’s fair to say that if you can get the hang of it, it definitely works. Like much of the future descriptions, your ability to create mental images has a significant bearing on its efficacy. If you have Aphantasia, it’s likely you’re going to gain nothing from the mind palace.

Even in the time of the Romans, the mixed efficacy of the mind-palace was recognised and debated. The previously mentioned Quintilian only believed in using it for simple lists, like auction results. On using the placement of objects in mind-palaces to memorise whole books, he said:

But will not the flow of our speech inevitably be impeded by the double task imposed upon our memory? For how can our words be expected to flow in connected speech, if we have to look back at separate symbols for each individual word? ​

My interpretation and ultra-shortening of the book I read on Roman memorisation of oratory is this:

‘A picture can say a thousand words’ - is not true, but a mental image can store sentences or a whole paragraph in a singular image, and those vivid or weird mental images are more successful. And then from that, the book describes it as “Together the series of scenes resemble a continuous narrative much like a cartoon strip today“. ​

Other key takeaways from the Roman view of memorisation were as follows:

• Memory was treated as a skill learned and trained through schooling/education rather than natural ability

• Daily/Regular routine is necessary

• Memorisation of larger things should be broken down into small passages and learned in chunks

• Memorisation should start with easier things and gradually increase in difficulty

• Often, incomplete memorisation and improvisation are more practical, picking out the key opening and closing phrases, and bullet points of details to cover for something like a long public speech.

What do we know now?

The bullet points described above all still have validity today, and we shouldn’t be surprised. Much of it is either intuitive or logical for a nation dependent on oratory to be able to deduce. Sometimes, a “if it worked for them, it’s good enough for me” attitude to history is really bad (In medicine, for example) but I think in this case it’s a fair assessment. You don’t need to know any more than a Roman to harness the core science of memorisation.

That being said, we have made some discoveries worth knowing in the last 100 years. Firstly, it’s been shown that what you do after a practice session of memorisation is very important. The less stimulating the activity, the better; you don’t want a film to be competing with the facts or script for space in your short-term memory. The best thing of all is to sleep after learning. Multiple studies have shown evidence that during the sleep process, long-term memories are formed and “locked in” by your subconscious. Relatedly, it’s been shown that jobs leading to weaker sleep, like working on long-haul flights, lead to a generally weaker long-term memory.

Variety and Novelty

If there’s one word you take from this article, it should be: Variety. It’s been shown that our brains always desire novelty. The most basic example of this is that many people can tell you about their first day at work, or first day at a new school, even a decade on. The novelty and unfamiliarity make it distinctive. If I asked you to walk me through what happened at your work or school 5 Wednesdays ago… I’d bet you’ve got almost no chance of answering.

We can utilise this element of our brains by trying to always make work or revision feel new, even if it’s similar to stuff we’ve had to memorise before. I briefly alluded to this in my unhinged study tips piece. Ways to provide novelty can be as simple as writing all your notes for the topic on green paper instead of white. At the end of this section, I will provide a list of example ways to provide novelty, to prove that there are dozens.

Active Vs Passive

First, though, we must talk about “active versus passive”. In the last 25 years, there’s been a huge shift in learning theory towards active learning, since it’s been shown to be generally more effective for everyone, regardless of perceived ‘learner types’. At its most basic, active memorisation activities are done, and passive ones are experienced. Watching a documentary is passive; you sit there, and the documentary happens to you, the same with reading through notes. If you really wanted to, you could read out a whole book without digesting any of the words or their meanings. You are just experiencing the words, not engaging with them. Active learning, in comparison, often involves writing, but there are lots of ways to be active even if you don’t love writing.

Active techniques are definitely more tiring, and the shift towards active methods doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any passive learning. The best rule of thumb to follow is that everything you learn should always incorporate both approaches. This ties into another linked idea, paired with that neurological desire for novelty, we need variety to keep things novel. Engaging with 1 topic through a poster, written notes, a mindmap and a YouTube documentary for an hour each is generally understood to surpass 4 hours straight of any of those 4 methods.

Other Trendy Topics

The next neurological discovery that (as far as we know) the Romans didn’t utilise was the cap on short-term memory. Studies show that your brain can juggle 5-9 things at once before it starts kicking things out of short-term memory to make space for new things. Accordingly, there is value in trying to learn things in sets of around this size. Instead of starting 40 flashcards in one day and trying to smash through them all, break them down into sets of 5-9 and just give that set your full focused intent to begin with.

Once you’ve covered all 40 in that set method, then you can revisit all 40 cards at once in each sitting. This revisitation is called “Spaced Repetition”, which is a term you will be painfully familiar with from school if you were born post-1995, or have heard being used to push language learning apps. Annoyingly, though, the buzzword exists because it works. Regularly spaced-out revisiting of a topic helps affirm its place in your long-term memory very effectively, due to how the brain stores memories. (Which we don’t fully understand, but if you’re really interested in the neurological side, research papers on spaced repetition are a perfect place to start)

The final component that is definitely a modern scientific development is the impact of all your non-learning activities on your memory. As well as learning before sleeping, the quality and quantity of sleep make a huge difference, alongside diet and nutrition. If you don’t take your food nutrition very seriously, a good, balanced multivitamin tablet will almost certainly pay for itself back in increased memory function. Stress and exercise both have major impacts on your long-term memory. High-stress events can cause a huge drop-off in fact recall ability, so if you’re learning a speech for presentation, you may remember it better if you reduce your time spent memorising and use some of that time on methods to reduce your stress about the event.

​Exercising is quite special because it can actually help you both directly and indirectly. The science shows cardio-based exercise increases blood flow to the brain, and those who exercise regularly have measurable increases in brain activity for memory and physically bigger hippocampi. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260402-want-to-improve-your-memory-the-right-type-of-exercise-can-give-it-a-boost) Exercises also come with secondary indirect memory help because it assists with stress reduction through the release of endorphins, and also better sleep, both of which then in turn help fact-recall.

Examples of techniques to provide Variety

As promised before, here is a list of novel ways to try to remember things. All are labelled as to whether they constitute active or passive memorisation:

• Create absurd/silly mini–essays making arguments about the topic. I.E “What would Mussolini think of the Nintendo Wii?” (ACTIVE)

• Find plain-prose books or audiobooks covering the broad topic area, providing a more digestible medium than a textbook (PASSIVE)

• Write your notes on a scroll (ACTIVE)

• Write your notes on coloured paper (ACTIVE)

• Annotate your notes/textbook with jokes and sarcasm (ACTIVE)

• print off your notes to read in an unusual font (PASSIVE)

• create a tier list, attaching opinions to different facts/elements of what you’re learning. This could be tier-listing book characters or quotes based on how funny/cool they are, you can even tier list something like lakes in a country, just on how much you like their names or not, the opinions don’t need to be robust. (ACTIVE)

• Challenge a friend who’s also learning something to a game (darts is perfect but it could be almost any game). Both of you only get the points you earn in the game if after each turn you succeed at one of your flashcards. This works even if you both are studying wildly different things. My treble 20 only counts if I remember an oceanography equation, yours only counts if you can remember the name of Kant’s book. It all works (ACTIVE)

• Make a powerpoint on the topic, as if you’re a PR company hired to advertise your material. This works best if you go really overboard, the more out-there the more novel (ACTIVE)

• Find a new trail or path to go walk, while listening to your material (PASSIVE)

• Create silly mnemonics, or memory aids. I still know the group of oceanography equations with ρ0gz (Density at the surfacegravitydepth) as the “pog equations”… as in the twitch emote. (ACTIVE)

• Make posters (ACTIVE)

• Draw 3 rectangles of decreasing size, perhaps from postcard size to a credit card. Start by explaining your topic in the big box in detail, then cut out half the detail to rewrite it within the 2nd box, and again making it ultra concise for your mini box. (ACTIVE)

• Tell a friend about what you’ve been learning. This one sounds a bit simple but all recall is repetition which is valuable (ACTIVE)

• If your friends are sick of hearing about your topics, vlog it like you’re posting it to youtube. You don’t have to actually post it to achieve learning. (ACTIVE)

• Write a song or poem on your topic (ACTIVE)

• look for other people’s derivative works on your topic. Obviously this only works for some topics, but you may find others have already written songs/poems/fanfics. (PASSIVE)

• Attach facts to locations on a map, literally with post-its or digitally. (ACTIVE)

• put one of the other memory aids described on your wall so you see it regularly (PASSIVE)

• Learn your phrases or facts in multiple languages. “Camus was born in Algeria, but his parents were French”, “Camus est né en Algérie, mais ses parents étaient français”. It doesn’t actually matter if your foreign phrase is grammatically correct either. (ACTIVE)

Obviously, this list is non-exhaustive and not all will apply to every topic matter being memorised, but if you’re not creatively minded towards inventing your own methods, these can get you a long way. You can repeat a few of these multiple times and still keep full novelty, like using different colours of paper 4 or 5 times. I intend across summer to periodically update this blog with updates on my own poem and story memorisation journey. If you have anything you find works well for you that I haven’t mentioned, I’d love to hear from you via the contact box.